Idea/Howto: Integrated help screens

[stuckless]

I set up a PiCade a few months back and it's running RetroPie. One complaint that I've gotten from others that have used my little PiCade is that they don't know what the buttons do. EmulationStation is good in that documents in the UI that B is Back and A is Enter, etc, but if those buttons are not labeled then the user has no idea.

It would be great if EmulationStation had some sort of hotkey/menu that when pressed could show an image that provides some help to the user. I could not find such a thing, so this is what I did.

I created some help screens that I dumped into /home/pi/RetroPie/roms/help/, and one of these is called picade-help.png. I then edited the

/opt/retropie/supplementary/emulationstation/emulationstation.sh

script and inserted this line

fbi -1 -a -noverbose /home/pi/RetroPie/roms/help/picade-help.png

near the top

Now when I turn on the PiCade it shows the help screen

and waits for the user to press the Right Trigger ( back right button), and when they do, EmulationStation boots as normal.

In addition to this, In some systems, I also add a custom help screen, and I add that to the gamelist.xml such that it shows as the first item and when the user selects it, it will show a custom help. To achieve this I do the following.

1. I created a dummy help.zip file and placed in /home/pi/RetroPie/roms/arcade/
2. Edited gamelist.xml and added the following entry

        <game>
                <path>./help.zip</path>
                <name>'1@1' Button Help</name>
                <desc>LT + Start will return to menu</desc>
                <image>~/RetroPie/roms/help/arcade-help.png</image>
                <rating>10</rating>
                <releasedate>20210101T000000</releasedate>
                <developer>Sean</developer>
                <publisher>Sean</publisher>
                <genre>Help</genre>
        </game>

3. Edited /opt/retropie/supplementary/runcommand/runcommand.sh and in the runcommand() function after the get_params check I added the following...

    SLS_BASE_ROM=`basename -s .zip "$ROM"`
    if [[ "$SLS_BASE_ROM" == "help" ]] ; then
        if [[ -f /home/pi/RetroPie/roms/help/${SYSTEM}-help.png ]] ; then
           fbi -1 -a -noverbose /home/pi/RetroPie/roms/help/${SYSTEM}-help.png
           exit 0
        fi
        fbi -1 -a -noverbose /home/pi/RetroPie/roms/help/help.png 
        exit 0
    fi

Those 3 steps ensure that in the arcade roms menu '1@1' Button Help shows up at the top (because of sorting) and has a preview image. When you select it, it shows the full-screen help image.

Here are a couple of pictures to show what that looks like in the PiCade. (sorry about the reflections)

Previous to this, I was creating and printing help instructions and taping them to the unit, but, I think this is a better approach. It would be nice if EmulationStation supported integrated help (or maybe it does, and I can't find it :) )